Chrome River Technologies

Chrome River was co-founded by Alan Rich and Dave Terry in 2007.[1] Rich had originally started a software company, Elite Data Processing, with his father Harvey Rich in 1988.[2] The company, specializing in the similar field of financial management systems, was renamed Thomson Elite after being acquired by the Thomson Corporation in 2003.[3]

Rich stepped down from Thomson Elite in February 2007,[2] founding Chrome River in March of the same year.[4] Chrome River was first released into the market in 2008, initially focusing on law firms.

By 2012 Chrome River was used by almost half of the 100 largest law firms in the United States, and the company began to focus on expanding into the general corporate market.[5] In 2012 the company took a US$3 million investment to fund its expansion.[1] Chrome River also announced its first overseas expansion, in London, in 2012.

In January 2014, the company received US$17 million in capital from Bain Capital Ventures.[6] In June 2015, equity firm Great Hill Partners invested US$100 million into the company, in order to grow the company's global presence.[7] The company is using this capital to accelerate development of its enterprise and mobile technologies and to continue its global expansion. A further $35 million was raised by the company in 2018.[8]

In 2016, Chrome River announced further international expansion with the launch of its presence in Sydney,[9] and in 2018 the company launched a presence in Germany.[10]

As of 2018, Chrome River has been listed in the Los Angeles Business Journal's Fastest Growing Companies list and the Inc. 500/5000 seven times each, and the Deloitte Fast 500 five times.

Chrome River's software focuses on automating processes around expense reporting and supplier invoice processing for businesses,[11] focusing on corporate expense management. The software is offered as a software as a service.[12] The company's solution uses optical character recognition and data extraction technologies to extract and categorize data from images (typically paper receipts) and HTML email receipts, to create line items on expense reports.

Chrome River's interface is a web app built using HTML5, featuring responsive web design (RWD). This allows it to be accessed via any mobile web browser without the need to download a mobile app.

The company's PROSPER product, integrates a company's expense data with sales data from its Salesforce.com CRM solution, allowing sales and finance teams to visualize which expense types have influence on sales, and how managers should deploy sales staff, based on upcoming travel plans.[13]

The company partners with a number of financial institutions (including U.S. Bank and Western Union), and business travel software providers (including Amadeus, Sabre, Expedia's Egencia corporate travel division, and Yatra) to create solutions to streamline the process of creating and processing expenses.

Chrome River has a customer base of more than 1,000 organizations, with 2 million users across more than 115 countries. The company predominantly sells to Global 2000 and Fortune 500 organizations, although it also has multiple small and medium-sized enterprise and non-profit customers. As a result of the company's heritage in the legal industry, Chrome River is used by more than three-quarters of the AmLaw 100 and more than two-thirds of the Global 100 law firms. Chrome River also has more than 100 customers in higher education, as a result of its partnership with education management software provider, Ellucian.

Notable customers include Cargill, Coca-Cola Hellenic, Bosch, and Sabre Corporation.